Navy fishes for sunken warplanes

Expedition checks records' accuracy

May 31, 2004|By H. Gregory Meyer, Tribune staff reporter.

His line is a data cable, his tackle a torpedo-shaped sonar device and his trawler an inflatable Navy boat used to detect mines.

His catch, Chief Petty Officer Carl Myers hopes, will be several World War II planes lost in the southern lobe of Lake Michigan during carrier training exercises that readied more than 17,000 Navy pilots for combat.

As the nation takes a day off Monday in honor of lost servicemen, Myers and seven colleagues from a naval ordnance disposal unit plan to be trolling for some of the Wildcats, Hellcats, Dauntlesses and Avengers resting on the lake bottom.

Their weeklong mini-expedition will be the Navy's first attempt to do its own survey of the underwater cemetery of historic planes that crashed between 1942 and 1945.

The planes trained on the USS Wolverine and USS Sable, side-wheel steamers retrofitted with flight decks and docked at Navy Pier. Hundreds of accidents left eight dead and some 120 planes to sink or be dumped offshore, said Wendy Coble, an underwater archeologist with the Washington-based Naval Historical Center who is running the survey this week.

The exercise is sensitive for two reasons: The sunken planes have become extremely valuable, and their whereabouts have already been mapped by a private firm that recovers them. In addition, those that went down with their pilots are considered war graves.

Well-preserved in the lake's freshwater depths, the planes have caught the eye of scuba-diving vandals and parts-seeking collectors. In 2000 the Navy adopted more stringent regulations on recovery of underwater planes, which remain government property, Coble said.

`We have already done this'

A&T Recovery, a Chicago-based firm, has already recovered 31 World War II planes from the lake on behalf of the National Museum of Naval Aviation, which like the Naval Historical Center is a unit of the Navy.

This week's project has hit a nerve with Taras Lyssenko, co-owner of A&T Recovery, who said he's already pinpointed every plane's location and likened the efforts of Coble's team to the government trying to re-invent the light bulb.

"It isn't my lake, but what I am saying is we have already done this," said Lyssenko, who closely guards information on the location of the planes because it is crucial to A&T's business and essential to protecting the wrecks.

Capt. Robert Rasmussen, the director of the Pensacola, Fla.-based naval aviation museum, said that Lyssenko has been the only one to know the precise whereabouts of the planes.

"I don't know where the airplanes are that he's found," Rasmussen said. "Nor would I particularly want to know. He's invested the resources in finding them, and as far as I'm concerned that's one of the cards that he's in a position to play in negotiating for the recovery."

Coble, who will be aboard the boats this week, said her team is putting its $18,000 research grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for a different purpose than Lyssenko's. The point, she said, is to try to square crash accounts from the logbooks of the Wolverine and the Sable with the picture that emerges via sonar. They also plan to visit only 11 of the 80 sites, hoping that success there would confirm the logbooks' accuracy.

And she hopes the information gleaned will help the Navy find solutions to questions about how to "manage" the wrecks, whether it's saving them from zebra mussels or determining which ones are most important to save.

Tales of wild weather, pilot error and derring-do filled the pages of Chicago newspapers during the war. In April 1943, for example, three planes crashed after takeoff from the Wolverine as ice caked their windshields. Only one returned alive after a park district guard rowed out from a Rogers Park beach.

Unit usually hunts explosives

Based in Ft. Story, Va., the Navy unit trying to locate the wrecks ordinarily searches for underwater explosives.

On Lake Michigan they'll spend 10-hour days crisscrossing square-mile boxes above suspected crash sites in a pattern Coble calls "mowing the lawn." But if Sunday's short test run was any indication, it won't be tedious.

Myers served as coxswain as a team of two sailors and a Coast Guardsman took one of two survey boats onto a turbulent lake. Sunday's violent storms precluded a full day's search.

As the 24-footer slid over the water, Petty Officer 2nd Class Art Umpuch was slapped in the face by a giant wave before he unsealed a waterproof case and booted up a laptop computer inside. Then he plugged in the blue data cable that doubles as an umbilical cord for the sonar "towfish" sitting beside him.

The sailor hefted the towfish over the boat's rubber wall as another sailor paid out the cable. But as the sonar started to click underwater, an error message bleeped on the laptop. When the search resumes on Monday, Umpuch said, the glitch will be fixed.